Join Date: Apr 2017
Posts: 4
Disclaimer
What this thread will not contain: Hand histories, graphs, glorifying of the life of a pro, or any usage of the phrase “the poker world” that isn’t being bitingly sarcastic.
What this thread will actually contain: The truth. Or rather, my truth. Okay, truth isn't the right word since that implies an objective absolute. What you'll be getting is my unfiltered thoughts, nothing more and nothing less. The real, honest, slightly stream of consciousness thoughts regarding this dysfunctional, dying subculture that so many of us have become hopelessly entangled in (why the hell did I go to that 1/2 home game in college anyway? I’m overall grateful for what poker has given me and should be able to move on to something else in the near future but I still sometimes wonder what would have happened if I’d just done chess club or something instead)
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I am a professional poker player. I play as high as 25/50. I am aiming to make 200k this year.
It was only three years ago that I was a sad, insecure kid who would have exploded with pride if he had the chance to type out the above and have it be true. Now, the idea of assigning any sort of worth to those three sentences seems as absurd as a grown adult assigning worth to their SAT score. Even re-reading it sounds in my head like the cadence Patrick Bateman uses when he says he lives in the American Gardens Building on West 81st Street on the 11th floor.
So, I did it. I'm a pro. And I like to think that among the pros I’m one of the good guys. I never angleshoot, I never go south, I never berate, I never slow roll. But maybe meeting the bare minimum of poker etiquette isn’t what makes you a good guy.
Here are a list of more obscure poker sins I’ve committed:
- Internally laughing snidely at the leaks in the games of people who consider me a true friend
- Furiously demanding fairness from the universe despite not having the courage to be a source of it myself
- Self-mythologizing my poker prowess to feel like my identity has a meaningful component to it so that I can feel like I’m more than just “random male in his twenties #4,083,827,927”.
- Being a constant stream of ****-talking about other poker players (not just the bad ones. Good players are not exempt either. Nor are my friends). It is mentally exhausting having to keep track of which person I’m ****-talking and to whom I'm ****-talking them and take care not to accidentally badmouth that player to someone that’s actually friends with him, yet I still do it.
- Bantering and laughing with a whale in a seemingly warm fashion when in reality I’m internally calculating the bare minimum of effort needed to keep him entertained for long enough to get his stack, like I’m the Terminator or something (except at least when he’s reprogrammed by the resistance and has his CPU’s learning function reactivated* the Terminator is actually a very sincere, honest dude without a hint of malice in his being. I guess I’m more like Skynet then – unchanging in its callous nature from movie to movie, even in the new Genisys one that was so bad I felt like my childhood was being punched in the nuts [*This was in a deleted scene from Terminator 2; it wasn’t in the original cut of the movie showed in theaters/on TV in case you were confused as to why you didn’t remember that part {it also didn’t use any CGI to accomplish the ‘Sarah Connor in a mirror trick’, Linda Hamilton actually has a twin sister who simply sat on the other side of a clear window and a puppet resembling Arnold Schwarzenegger}]).
Sure, the fact that I can even admit this with such self-awareness is itself proof that I am a good guy blah blah shut up. The point of this thread is to see if in admitting all this to myself I can maybe become the kind of person who doesn’t even ponder whether he’s good or not because he’s too busy, well, being good. If I can become someone who stops relentlessly categorizing people as good or bad, or thinking that certain people deserve to be rewarded and others should be punished. To empathize with the people I hate. To figure out what the people I love need rather than what they owe me. I guess that's what my 'goal' or 'challenge' is.
And who knows, maybe someone who reads this will internalize it and have their way of thinking change just the tiniest bit. Or just ignore all of it but inexplicably get the urge to rewatch Terminator 2, which is also acceptable.
